From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.
For more than 30 years, the Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield (BDG) studied, documented, and preserved the biological diversity of the Guiana Shield in northern South America, which comprises parts of French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, and Venezuela. The BDG program resulted in numerous publications, and a recently produced publication documents a decade of specimen collections by former and current Smithsonian botanists Karen Redden and Ken Wurdack. The open access publication written by Carol Kelloff, Karen Redden, Ken Wurdack, and Sara Alexander (Smithsonian Contribution to Botany, no. 116) is available for download at https://doi.org/10.5479/si.21912828.
In 2006, Vicki Funk asked Redden and Wurdack, who had met in the U.S. National Herbarium the previous year, if they would conduct a joint collecting expedition for the BDG. The BDG had maintained a full- or part-time resident collector in Guyana from 1986 until 2000, after which point it sponsored regular collecting expeditions to locations across the Guiana Shield. Redden and Wurdack’s first trip in 2006 was followed by 16 more (5 jointly plus additional expeditions by Redden with others), in a collaborative partnership that would last until the BDG’s final expedition in 2014.
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